nobody actually meets in a bookshop
by ForASecondThereWe'dWon
Summary: A messy love story.


**Author's Note:**

So... this one's a bit of a genre shift for me. Shout-out to the readers who've asked me about writing something angstier.

Based on the Tumblr prompt: **"I really wish you'd told me your mother was in town."**

* * *

"Nope," she says. "You have to leave. Nobody actually meets in a bookshop."

"I told you," Peter insists, almost laughing as she hustles him to the door, "I _do_ have to leave."

He's late now. A friend (not that close) from college is exhibiting his sculptures at the gallery one door down (he won't realize for a relatively long time how near the gallery is). Peter turned too soon, didn't read the sign on the door, just saw the mood lighting and a crowd of people inside.

"Get out then," she tells him, and they're already standing on the sidewalk. You'd think rain would make it cleaner, but it feels grittier than ever under his sneakers, like the water got into all the cracks and floated the broken things to the surface.

"MJ," someone calls from inside right before the door closes.

The woman in front of him gives Peter wide, mischievous eyes and he has a feeling. A second later, they're hurrying down the sidewalk and he feels like an outlaw.

"Book launch," she sighs, then glances at him and laughs, helps him get his arms out of the coat he's been trying to give her because it's still spitting. She has her purse, but he doesn't know if she abandoned a jacket back at the bookshop when they made their getaway.

"Maybe the author won't take it personally," Peter offers.

They glance sideways at each other and snort. It's a miracle, this synchronized snort. Someone would really have to gather quite a number of pigs together to produce two snorts at the same time.

Their sexual attraction catches up with them two blocks later. On the way to his apartment, he does all kinds of things he never thought he'd do in a taxi, like French kissing a near-stranger while she assertively palms his cock through his good jeans. (What do you wear to an exhibition opening, he'd wondered. Dark blue denim seemed unobjectionably and noncommittally cool.)

An opportunity to take in her reaction to his very middle-of-the-road apartment doesn't arise. They're wrestling each other's clothes off just inside the door, no light on yet. It's her who reaches back and flips the lock and it's a solid sound, solid like the kind of surface he wants to lay her down on because he's really going to go for it, no holding back. He grips her skirted ass in one hand, holding the front of her to his crotch and when she bumps her hips forward, he gets his hand up under her skirt and into her underwear while she breathes hot in his ear.

Peter wonders for a second why this decision feels so good and realizes it's because he made it for himself. He's completely in control.

She uses his body like a ladder and descends to her knees, then grips the waist of his jeans and pops the line of buttons holding them shut. Fuck, maybe not especially in control. Her tongue's caressing him―Peter can't tell which feels thicker: his straining cock or the humid paradise of her mouth. He might be standing on Ned's shoes. Oh well, the woman already knows she's taller. Her lips close around him like she's trapping a secret. Her hand is very soft; it's cupping his balls.

Clean sheets and a clean bounce when he drops her onto them. Turns out the terms for a negotiation of power involve three fingers moving slickly inside her (she's moaning and Peter's about ready to chew up the mattress for how badly he wants to hold onto some part of her with his mouth) and the lights on.

"Turn over," he pants at her, buttoned shirt wrinkled and open.

She flops onto her stomach and he rides the motion of her hips with his hand while she rides his thread count like she's testing her clit for durability. His tongue fits nicely into the sweaty dip in her spine.

He wakes up for less than 10 seconds at 2-something in the morning because the light's still on. It's possible that he turns it off, or maybe it just burns out before daylight.

She's getting dressed (at an hour he's considerably more comfortable calling 'morning'), but something about her says she wasn't just going to slip out of here like hot butter. He rolls onto his side, glad the sheet's over his hips because otherwise this might feel like a sleazy one-night stand.

"Peter," she finally acknowledges. Her hair's up in a red elastic that she probably got from his desk on the other side of the room. He wonders if that hurts. Seeing the length of it, wavy and held away from her neck, he's stunned by how sexy she is. Good _god_.

"MJ."

"Don't call me that."

He heard it, he definitely heard someone call that out to her last night. Has he done something really terrible and slept with someone (fornicated _rapturously_ with someone) whose name he doesn't actually know?

"But I thought―"

"Only my friends call me MJ."

"So what do your boyfriends call you?"

He offers a smile and if it's a dorky smile, too late. At least Peter's had a chance to demonstrate additional selling points of his body's features and abilities. Ahem.

With a smirk, on go her shoes. They're classy, but flat. Good for fleeing a hookup. Which Peter suddenly (not that suddenly―the blowjob in the entryway was staggeringly convincing) doesn't want this to be.

"They call me in the morning."

"But you didn't give me your number." This is smooth, right?

She tosses her ponytail and they both know, he's pretty sure, that she does this to torture him. It's affected yet effective.

Which is to say he's stiff as hell beneath the sheet.

"You're not my boyfriend."

A tough-luck-champ smile and she's up, crusading for the front door.

* * *

No, it's true. Nobody actually meets in a bookshop.

MJ first sees Peter in a bar six months earlier. Maybe they don't shake hands or trade names, maybe Peter doesn't even see her, but he's in her head like an inescapable fever dream after that.

Eventually, she gives up the table. She'd have been better off standing than grabbing a stool at the bar, but she's wearing bad shoes, bad expensive shoes, expensive beautiful shoes that pinch and make her have to sit. Her legs are just her legs, but when she sits on a high bar stool and crosses them, men enter her personal space like it's a public washroom. Dammit, she should've gone to the washroom and sat on a toilet, dress between her ass and the seat. Well, hindsight.

But washrooms don't have ginger ale and MJ would rather not find out if, when push came to shove, she would drink water from the tap of a bar's bathroom sink. Tonight will have to stand as it is, already total shit without the possibility of lowering her standards further.

Speaking of lowering standards.

"What can I get you?" a slightly tipsy man demands. He's squeezed in between her seat and the next one over, standing (power position). She feels the warmed texture of his suit jacket brush her arm. She'd shudder, but it'd just make him think he'd turned her on.

"Nothing, asshole."

"What'd you say?"

MJ smiles at her ginger ale.

"'Nothing at all.'"

He scoffs and gives up.

Bachelor number two: "What's that?"

"Ginger ale."

"Is not."

This is so hilarious to her that she frowns.

"Yep, bubbles and everything." MJ lifts her glass from the bar top for his inspection.

"I'll get you a martini."

Easy, Bond.

"Nope, I've got my drink."

"That's not a drink," says bachelor number three, edging in. Number two fucks off like a woman who can't be bombasted out of guzzling ginger ale isn't worth his time.

"Tell that to my increasing urge to piss," MJ suggests. Men hate that, the word 'piss' coming out of a woman's mouth.

"Bitch," he dismisses.

In the three minutes before the next dickhead tries his luck, she glances backwards, into the room, and spots the man she'll come to know as Peter six months from now. She faces forward again. She wants something that good. He looks kind, laughing next to someone she presumes is an old friend.

"A whiskey for her."

MJ looks around, then up, where a man has his hand above her head, index finger pointing sharply down. She thinks the fuck not.

"Fine with my ginger ale."

"What are you, pregnant? Cheap? 'Don't like the taste'? An alcoholic? Fall off the wagon," he dares, going ahead and assuming his last guess is the right one, leaning on the bar. "You'll like it." He begins stroking the back of her forearm with his finger. "I know what else you'll like. Su―"

She meets Peter for real six months later and it's like an exhalation.

* * *

"I miss phonebooks," he confides.

MJ puts all her surprise into her laugh, which Peter finds flattering and trusting.

"You know why?" he continues.

She thinks.

"Because you like to stand on them to feel taller?"

"_Wow_." But he's grinning like an idiot. "No. Because I've been wanting to look you up."

"Since last week," she confirms.

"Since you forcefully escorted me from a book launch like I was a shoplifter."

MJ allows him to hold her gaze for at least half a minute as they both struggle with their smiles. This feels right.

"And how far do you think you would've gotten with just 'MJ' to go on? Uh, mustard, please," she directs the hotdog vendor. "No ketchup."

"I think things would've worked out."

Peter cheers's her hotdog with his when it's ready and she hasn't taken off. They stroll down the sidewalk together and he wonders if she has someplace to be or if she just always looks that great. From the times he's met her, she's two for two, so the latter seems plausible.

"Why's that?"

"It's fate!" he explains, turning and pointing back at the peeling slogan on the striped umbrella floating above the vendor's cart. 'It's Fate!' it reads. Peter cannot begin to understand what the hell it has to do with hotdogs.

MJ laughs, even with food in her mouth.

"Destiny's gotten a little pedestrian if its big play is to give us the same favourite street meat cart."

Peter shrugs. They walk in silence to the next intersection, the city alive around them.

"This is the worst fucking hotdog I've had in a year," she confesses.

"I only got in line because I saw you," he says.

"If I give you my number…" she begins as they dump their hotdogs in the next trashcan. They will proceed to walk another eight blocks together. "…will you promise not to call me?"

"God, of course, never."

Peter's beaming as she puts it into his phone.

"I'm really bad at making new friends. I hit, like, a friend maximum and I find it psychologically impossible to add to that number." He's nodding along with her bullshit. "Really an awful human being. A perfect New Yorker."

"Cool, I hate you already."

"That's ideal," she avows, handing back his phone.

"I'll only be the guy you want to see when you're hungry for a long piece of meat."

"Jesus Christ, Peter." Her hand goes to her throat like she's almost choked, which, hello.

"Oh no," he says in a voice that screams his words were no accident. "Oh my god, I was talking about the hotdogs."

"Obviously." They eye each other with hilarity.

Peter smiles.

"Just trying to make sure you don't start attempting to be my friend either. That you don't like me."

"Well, you'll notice that I didn't ask for your number back," she points out.

He rocks on his feet, grinning.

"You want it, don't you?"

She hands her phone over with a sigh.

"Only so I can give your contact info to my lawyer when I'm suing you for hotdog-related harassment."

Peter nods, tapping in his number.

"Planning ahead. I can't stand that in a woman."

* * *

If the hotdog hadn't scrambled her insides, she would've called him the same night. Even with the scrambling, she can only wait a day. And, yes, she does actually call him. Phone-to-ear calls him. Shit.

He shows up with flowers although it's almost midnight, fingers wrapped around their plastic sleeve when she opens her door.

"Don't make that face," he says. "They were really cheap."

She accepts them with a carefully tempered smile, doesn't let him see the full extent of her happiness.

"Then I have a really shitty vase they'll look great in."

"You don't have a roommate?" Peter checks, peering around a little while she deals with the (actually lovely―fuck him) flowers.

"Um, no," MJ says distractedly. Is she really arranging the flowers or making a mess? She gives up and sets the vase on her kitchen table. She turns to Peter.

"I―"

"Do. I know. I saw the extra shoes and took in the general multi-dude vibe of your apartment." She says it without judgement, merely as a description, but just in case he is offended, she offers something up. Unusual for her. "I have a nice place with just me in it because my mother feels guilty and it's more straightforward to accept her money than her, well… You're aware this was a booty call, right, Peter?"

He shrugs; it's one of the most reassuring gestures MJ's ever had directed at her.

"I was hoping. It had to be either that or hotdogs and I try not to eat meat after nine."

She waffled between keeping on her boring underwear (she's at home, Peter is a low-key fuck) or swapping them for something sleek and silky (low-key in all ways but how good he is in the sack). When his eyes go glassy, MJ feels excellent about changing.

It's slower this time and she'll feel his lips on her shoulder whenever she closes her eyes for weeks after this. He has very subtle fingertips. When they stroke into the cups of her bra and make tender passes over her nipples, MJ thinks she might orgasm, though prior to this, having her breasts touched has never been much more than perfunctory for both her and the man. Peter's circling motion is so lulling and delicate that his sudden tug on her nipples gets a scream out of her.

The feel of his hard thighs under her hands is wonderful and it's incomprehensible to her that he hasn't bragged about his workout routine. Gotta be squats―the guy's ass is rock-solid too. Her memory foam mattress will probably form to it, betraying her; it's never been willing to hold her shape and she's always taken that personally. Peter groans when she kisses him deeply.

She wants to be on top. He's amenable.

* * *

Ned tells him he's tempting fate, shoes already on, keys in hand. It's Saturday, late afternoon, too long since he's seen her, which could be any length of time at all.

"Peter," she says when she picks up, "this number is for emergencies only."

He flounders, sees Ned laugh at him from the couch, as if he can hear what's going on. Jerk.

"I just want to take you for a drink," Peter blurts into the phone.

"How about coffee instead?"

"That's perfect," he agrees, giving Ned the finger as he leaves their apartment. "I'm having a heart attack, so maybe the caffeine will restart my heart."

"Right. And what was the alcohol supposed to do?"

"…Clean the wound?"

"There's a wound _and_ a heart attack. Buddy, you're in bad shape."

"Why else would I have called you?" He's smiling, racing down the stairs, barely hanging onto the handrail. "It's definitely an emergency."

She's funny today, not like ha-ha. Peter's curious about what could be making her uncomfortable in the coffee shop she directed him to meet her at. They don't do a lot of personal conversation though, which is him following her lead. He'd like to touch her hand, but the table is a crumbling canyon between them and he can't get across.

"Are you al―"

MJ shakes her head. It's not a no, it's her telling him to screw off.

"This is a strange place to meet," she says.

"You picked it."

"I know, I know. It's just, as far as our acquaintanceship goes…"

"Oh, our _acquaintanceship_." He shoots her a sneaky smile. "Is that what's bothering you?" Peter shifts his legs and leans forward, dropping his voice. "That this isn't about sex?"

"This," she assures him, gesturing back and forth between them with one finger, "is about sex."

"Does that mean you're going to ask me to take my boxers off and pass them to you under the table?"

She allows him a genuine almost-smile.

"No one in here wants to see that."

"Not even you? Crap, that's going to be a problem if you and I are only about sex. I'm feeling a little undervalued."

Suddenly, MJ's ducking her head, but not before he sees the shape of her mouth change. The pain contorting her forehead.

Peter's hand dives across to cover hers.

"Please, you can talk to me."

"I really," she says quietly, sniffs, "think you could work on your pacing a little. In bed."

MJ glances up, composed. She straightens her back. His eyebrows rise until he realizes she's messing around.

"Sorry," Peter says easily. "I guess I get right into it too fast sometimes. I'm too excited to have you." He gives her burning eyes and lets them cool when she bites her lips together. "I swear, it's like I forget that I don't actually like you and this is just sex."

"Well, it is. How's your latte?"

"Jeeze, what else do you want to know, my social security number?!"

She laughs like she's giving in.

"You better not have memorized my coffee order," MJ threatens as they're leaving.

"I'll try to forget," Peter lies.

* * *

It's been two and a half weeks and she won't let herself miss him. Cindy talks her into a slow lap of a museum after work. MJ agrees because the publisher she does cover design for launched one of their anticipated heavyweights last week, so for the first time in a while, she's not staying late to move elements around on the book jacket.

"You're always going to need her to love you like that," Cindy says softly, steering them on a lap of the room, "but you don't have to need _her_."

Cindy is a counsellor and damn hyper about it too.

MJ drags her feet, lets her arm hang heavy in her friend's. They have this conversation too much, too many times a year.

"I don't need her to love me."

"You do, you little liar." She'd better not be this blunt with her clients. "You _are_ actually a person, as much as you try to be whatever you're trying to be."

"I'm hungry," MJ complains. "That's one I can commit to. Let's skip this and get Thai."

"You're not going to escape this―"

"And you're not going to fix it."

"―have to at least talk about her if not _to_ her."

"I _did_ talk to her, that's why I'm so… oh no."

She stops in her tracks and so does Cindy, tense as a doe. Peter's circling counter-clockwise.

"Who's that?" Cindy asks immediately, looking where MJ's looking.

"He's…" But her throat is all dry.

Cindy gasps.

"He's Book Launch. _Cute_. Ok, I forgive you for abandoning me with your coat and your work friends."

"They're not my friends," MJ insists, still staring at Peter. She and Cindy haven't moved and Peter and the guy he's with are coming closer.

He sees them. Standing obstructively in front of a display, how could he not? She used to be more invisible. Is she the difference, or is Peter?

Peter, who smiles at her a long time before his friend elbows him aside and introduces himself as Ned. Things tumble forward from there and suddenly Cindy is absolutely all for heading straight to dinner.

"I'm not trying to set up a double date," Peter impresses upon them with a very serious slice of his arm, forbidding underhanded matchmaking schemes. It's clearly for MJ's benefit. He's trying not to scare her, she sees. Wanting to make sure she doesn't feel trapped or tricked or romanced.

"I'm engaged," Ned explains.

Cindy shrugs.

"I'm a lesbian."

"He and I aren't dating either," MJ clarifies, gesturing jerkily at Peter. He looks hurt and she wishes she could wish it wasn't true. It just isn't a good idea. She's not a good idea.

They make it through dinner. Cindy and Ned have connected over some nerdy thing that MJ doesn't want to pretend to listen to, which leaves her with her thoughts. She keeps rolling her dessert spoon between her index and middle fingers.

Peter's next to her and it's nothing for him to lean in her direction, frowning at her hand.

"I used to smoke," she says.

"Is something making you crave it?"

Ned and Cindy burst into laughter across from them. MJ smiles weakly, then glances at Peter.

"I got a call from my mom." She says it quietly, but not enough to be suspicious. Cindy already knows and there's no reason for Peter's friend to have a second thought about MJ's relationship with her mother.

"Anything wrong?"

"Just the fact that she called." She smiles again and slouches. He's staring at her like he wants to hold her up.

"Can we talk about it?"

His earnest eyes grow deeper, like two holes in the ground that are being shovelled out as she looks into them. The restaurant is a pleasant hum.

"Can we _not_ talk about it?" She squints at him. "What if, instead, we go back to my apartment and fuck in the shower?"

"MJ!" Cindy's staring, shocked. MJ rolls her eyes.

"Go back to talking about _The Hobbit_."

"We're discussing _The Silmarillion_."

MJ turns to Peter again.

"Shower? Yes? No?"

"Depends on the scent of your body wash."

"I've got three kinds. Come on."

The shower winds up being a bad idea. The lighting and the white tiles make her feel vulnerable and slimy-souled.

"Don't be romantic," she warns him when he begins to carefully wash her back.

"It's hygiene, MJ." She doesn't make him call her 'Michelle' instead.

The water's hitting her face and she closes her eyes, trying not to bolt, not to run from the fact that Peter cares and was a really, really poor choice for a one-night stand. She rests her head back against his shoulder and he stops cleaning her to hug her to him.

"I'm stronger than what you've seen," she feels it's important to say.

He snorts and she rolls her head to glare at him.

"Sorry, it's just… That's the last thing you need to prove. You never let yourself be anything else."

"Kiss my mouth."

Peter does. And he says a lot of kind things―a lot of true things, about them― that she tries to block from her ears, holding her head in the center of the heavy spray.

* * *

Lucky that she doesn't have the patience to be fingered this evening, because Peter cut his nails too short (she likes a little scratch to it) while distracted by the realization that he's started to love her. Ned's with Betty in a wedding planner's office somewhere and Peter and MJ are in missionary for about three seconds before they realize it and rearrange.

It's weird being at home. He quit the Avengers while he was still in high school, right after Tony died, but the feeling of alertness just in case he's dispatched to save the world is something Peter hasn't been able to get out from under. Or, _hadn't_ been able to. He seems to have more control of himself and his choices when she's around. Even has some authority in his voice when he speaks. He's not just the kid nobody wants the responsibility of saving.

They're on their sides, his front to her back, but Peter pulls them up onto their knees, driving into her with a hand flat on her spine. It's presence―a substitute for eye contact. He hears the way MJ throws her breath from her lungs. Her hand goes between her legs and the squeeze of her insides is like someone moulding the warm wax of a candle around his dick with their bare hands. Peter chokes, keeps going.

They don't talk much tonight, just try to be themselves from that first night. Back to basics.

An interlude.

* * *

This birthday card is for a child, but she bought it for him.

"Lego Luke Skywalker!" Peter exclaims, eyes going from the card to her face.

He's delighted and she eases back into the booth where they're sitting side by side, no one across from them. Their little nook is private, like a heartbeat.

"You like it?" she asks. Her finger rings the opening of his t-shirt sleeve.

Peter kisses her hard and fast, making her laugh and blush. She does and doesn't want it to be a big deal that she knows his birthday, went out of her way to discover it. Not by snooping through his wallet while he was passed out in bed after sex―by asking Ned. The harder route, for sure.

"I'm keeping it forever," he says enthusiastically. "For_ever_!"

MJ checks in on a small place in her mind and doesn't find anything frightening there. The only thing she'd been worried about was him liking his card. She tucks herself into his side, almost hoping he won't notice.

"You're probably just about at your limit, right?" Peter asks, quickly grabbing and draining his drink. "It's ok," he says when she doesn't correct him. "I'm fine with us rushing out of here for birthday sex."

Because she's shied from dates. Kept him back unless he wanted to approach penis-first. It wouldn't be a bad time to ask him to be more. MJ has a hunger for these words to leave his lips: 'My girlfriend's paying tonight.' She wants the waiter to know and the other people in the other booths, and anyone walking by on the sidewalk.

They have sex twice, playful both times and full of experimenting. In between, they catch part of a BBC food documentary marathon. The handjob MJ builds Peter back up with for their second round takes its technique from how they watched a turkey farmer handle the neck of a fowl during slaughter. They laugh and laugh until Peter goes, "Oh _fuck_, M." She sinks down on him, hands on his strong chest. His knees bend behind her. Support.

* * *

"I'm not trying to talk about MJ behind her back," Peter insists.

Cindy gives him a suspicious stare from the other side of her sleek glass desk.

"People come to this office for counselling appointments. For _themselves_," Cindy reinforces. "Not to snoop around in the lives of their romantic partners."

"I don't want to snoop and I don't want an appointment. I was trying to catch you on your lunch hour, which I obviously have." He motions to the salad she's stabbing at on purpose to make crisp snapping noises while he speaks. "I've been wondering how long you've known her."

She frowns.

"High school."

"But you've become really good friends._ Best_ friends, I assume," he checks. Cindy nods like she's pleased to be awarded this title. She should be. It's a good one. "Was it… How did it happen?"

"You want to know how long it took."

Ok, fair. Reading people is an important part of her job. Peter swings his arms once, tense, and nods. Cindy opens her mouth, but pauses a moment before she speaks. The clock in the corner is ticking loudly, really earning its paycheck; he wonders if it stops at five o' clock too and rests until the next day.

Cindy points her fork at him like she's spear hunting and he's the dumb fish who doesn't know how to evade.

"I'll tell you because it's about my relationship with MJ. Don't push your luck."

"Understood."

"Slow at first," she admits, laying down her fork. "She's a quiet person. Well, no." Cindy smiles to herself. "A private person. I think I put myself in her path enough times, included her in enough events and conversations she just barely didn't want to escape that she accepted my existence in her life."

"I'm around her as much as she lets me be around her―"

She holds up a hand to stop him, but it's not aggressive.

"It needs to be on her terms."

"Sometimes," Peter says, lifting his eyes to the bright white ceiling, "I think she's cornered herself with her own terms. Sometimes I think she wants… that she wants me the way I want her."

"Don't push her," Cindy says, and there's a threatening edge all of sudden that makes Peter straighten up. The lines of her black blazer seem sharper. "Be around her, let her see that you're there, but don't infringe on her―"

"―control," he finishes. Cindy looks surprised. "Look," Peter begins, taking a seat across from her, then shifting his weight forward and lowering his voice, "that's something I get, ok?"

She continues to bristle and, from what comes next, make the decision to talk more personally about her friend than she'd prepared Peter for. He can't hear the clock anymore.

"You know what it's like not to be allowed to do anything? To be without choices?"

"I know what it's like to have no limits at all and have every choice be agony."

Peter's breathing hard and he realizes his nose feels hot, his eyelashes feel wet when he blinks. After a long pause watching him sniffle, Cindy pushes a Kleenex box across the desk.

"I don't want to control her," he swears, voice soft as the tissue he's folding unevenly between his fingers. "I want her to trust me enough to need me without expecting me to fail."

He doesn't know if it's for MJ or for himself, but Peter tells Cindy something she might've heard about before. The story isn't old enough to qualify as urban legend―he's banking on that―so he hopes she believes him when he asks if she remembers a guy in a red mask who went by 'Spider-Man.'

* * *

MJ hates decorative pillows. She staggers around her living room, snatching coordinating throw cushions off her couch and attempting to stuff them into the nearest closest.

No, what she hates is navy blue. Why is there so much navy blue in her apartment? The first thing to go will be this raincoat, hanging innocently in the closet she's opening. MJ snatches it off its hanger and whips it onto the floor, then whirls, searching for anything else vaguely nautical.

Oh, but pillows and navy are nothing compared to teacups! Who the fuck has teacups? She wonders this, letting her cupboard door bang open, exposing their glossy white shells. What self-respecting, modern, feminist woman drinks tea from a delicate little cup instead of an extra-large mug that says 'GRL BOSS' or 'DON'T TELL ME TO SMILE.'

She's holding one of the teacups in her hand, shaking, and it slips. Just like that, shards all over the kitchen floor and MJ in a heap, leaning sideways into the fridge. All of that energy, spinning through her rooms and dismantling the material aspect of her life, collapses in on her. It pushes her down and won't let her breathe. It's a clawed foot on her back, like some of those fancy bathtubs. Her mother would buy her a bathtub like that if she asked for it.

What MJ's thinking, what her mind is crying out for as her mouth sobs to an empty apartment, is that she wants Peter. She wants him here and she doesn't want him to leave unless he's taking her with him. It almost physically burns to desire this, making her scream her way free from the breadth of her misery, which is like a wide river.

The fact that he said something to Cindy is all but confirmed; she acts weird if MJ comes anywhere close to mentioning him, weirder if Cindy brings up his name on her own. MJ doesn't think it can be anything terrible, but right now, in this bleak instant, it makes her furious.

She exhales. The stainless steel of the fridge door is icy and unyielding against her cheek.

Her phone's lying on the kitchen table, she knows this. It takes MJ a minute of merely staring at the table to get her ass off the floor. She finds him in her contacts. Hits 'Call.' Sitting on the floor, MJ eyes the teacup pieces. Her gaze jumps up when the call connects.

"Peter? I know this is short notice, but can you meet me somewhere? No, no, I just… I'm stuffed up. Yeah, really. Well, wait, Peter, I haven't even told you wha― Hold on, Peter. Nothing like that. It's just going to be the worst dinner reservation of my life."

* * *

Her under-eyes are cloudy, like literal clouds of the furiously grey thunderstorm variety, mottled with mascara. What he's feeling is jarred. She just looks so different than she does on the mornings they're trying to pretend haven't been accumulating. Going to bed without taking her makeup off is a world removed from the same smudgy effect he sees on her struggling face. The current damage has been done by the tears still coursing down her cheeks.

"I really wish you'd told me your mother was in town," Peter manages. He can feel the vertical lines his eyebrows are pushing into the center of his forehead. She'll hate this. His concern.

But MJ just snorts and shakes her head. She rolls her wet, red lips and ends the motion with a smacking sound that speaks for her. It says, "Well."

She's gone all the way to the top of the stairs, holding her quiet ground on the tiny landing. Peter won't try to squeeze up there with her. He steps one foot up and braces his elbow on it.

"You're smoking."

It's true. Her thumb flicks the end of a cigarette making the whole thing jiggle up and down too fast on the fulcrum of the index and middle fingers she has clamped around it. Toxic teeter-totter.

"I wanted to do something bad for me."

Her voice is weird―moist from distress and dry from the smoke. It's like playing checkers on both the black and white squares.

"Dying of lung cancer would definitely qualify," Peter assures her, then grabs her dangling wrist, plucks the cigarette away with his other hand. He tosses it down the stairs.

She waggles the pack so he can hear the rest of them shuffling inside, but she doesn't extract another, just puts the pack back in her pocket and scratches the side of her head. If anything, the silent crying makes her menacing. The babyish head-scratch can't touch it.

"That could start a fire you know." MJ points past him.

Peter turns, descends, grinds out the cigarette with the heel of his shoe.

"It's a moral dilemma, right?" she pushes, still standing above him. "If you let it burn, everyone in this building could be killed. If you put it out, it only hurts me."

She's told him the rules of a game he can't win since he's already stamped the cigarette out.

"What do you want, Peter?"

His hand is sweating on the bannister, but it's actually too cold in here.

"I want you not to hurt." Maybe that's a little profound for tonight, not because it's an outlier in the theme of the evening, but because everything, _everything's_ been intense. "Let's go." He holds his palm up to her, really not that many stairs above.

"Oh, is it time to pull myself together?" MJ wonders sarcastically, hovers her hand elegantly past her messy face.

"Actually, I was thinking we take the side exit at the bottom of the stairs and leave your mother with the bill."

She stares down, smiling, and flicks her eyebrows up in amused approval.

"Then you, what? Guide me out of here, slipping your hand provocatively into my coat and kissing my neck while we walk the dark streets? Take me back to my place like it's your place and worship my body until dawn in a manner that's dominant yet undeniably respectful? Make me feel worthwhile?" MJ looks up and takes deliberate, heavy steps down the stairs towards him. "Tell me this isn't just a fling?"

Their eyes are locked. He _has_ told her that.

"No. We walk to the subway entrance half a block east and ride to Cindy's stop, get out, and I don't leave you until she's letting you in her door."

Though she's been crying all along, now her face becomes recognizably sad. Peter wraps his arm tight around her back and rubs her shoulder briskly while they march down the stairs. The staircase seriously isn't wide enough for this.

It's her who pushes the door open under the red exit sign, but him who holds it. MJ's looking at him and there's a lot going on in her expression. He spanks her on the way out so she won't have to confront that he's not a bad guy.

* * *

"He may not be a bad guy."

"And who's been telling you that for months?" Cindy asks sarcastically. MJ tries again to stretch her feet across her friend's lap in hopes of a massage, but Cindy shoves them away with disgust.

"It hasn't been months. It's barely been six weeks."

"Feels like longer. Doesn't it?" she presses. MJ tilts her face into the back of the couch and smiles reluctantly. "In a good way," Cindy clarifies.

"In a good way," MJ confirms. She sighs. "But he knows too much now."

"So, do we skip the girl talk and put out a hit on him? What was his last name again… Parker?" Cindy laughs. "He knows just enough, which is honestly a miracle when it was you who had to give up personal information."

"I did fuck up though." MJ rubs her forehead. "I brought him into that dinner with no warning, and I didn't explain anything afterwards."

"He's not an idiot. I'm sure he picked up on the dynamic between you and your mom. You've never really been one for talking things out anyway. I know how much it means that you _showed_ him something so difficult."

"It means I had a moment of weakness."

"You _like_ him," Cindy counters with a knowing smirk. "You're allowed to like him."

"Am I allowed to _love_ him?" MJ jokes, not meeting her friend's eye.

"MJ." She won't look. "_MJ_." She looks. "Yes," Cindy assures her, "you are."

* * *

Peter brings the phone to his ear before he's able to get his eyes open. Could be any day of the week. He scratches his head and speaks a groggy greeting.

"Peter, I love you."

It's been a long time since he's been up and out of his apartment so quickly, sneakers squealing in the hall. A long time since he felt so instinctively that there was a place he needed to be.

* * *

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, _dammit_, Peter, be careful!" she gasps as her boyfriend trips backwards over one of Ned's cardboard boxes.

He catches himself easily though, even with both hands holding firmly to the underside of the couch they're maneuvering through the apartment's front door. She doesn't know how he does it, but Peter has an uncanny sense of balance.

Besides getting kicked a couple of feet across the floor, the box looks unscathed. Which one is this, she wonders, craning her neck to look as she staggers past. Could be the one labelled 'Ned's Bed' (linens), 'Ned's Read' (books), 'Ned's Head' (a curiously extensive collection of hats), or another in the series of belongings Peter's best friend has felt the need to name in rhyme. He's in the process of carting his stuff over to his and Betty's new place before the wedding and even though MJ likes things tidy, she doesn't begrudge Ned the scattering of boxes that remain in his ex-apartment. There's more than enough room for MJ to move in.

They sat down in the corner of a busy café, her and Peter, and she grit her teeth because it wasn't a date. It was something far more pivotal; she told him everything. Not _everything_ (MJ prefers to remain at least somewhat of a mystery to him―and he to her, she suspects, which is ok for now), but the issues she feels too old to blame on her mother. The push to excel, the rejection of compromise, the slide into MJ having her life measured and micromanaged and minimized. Never drinking anything stronger than coffee because it's a self-controlling, pre-emptive choice she made to circumvent her mother ever trying to reign in her drinking. (And now that she's a handful of years beyond the legal drinking age, she's sort of over the hype and sticks with her ginger ales, thanks, bar creeps.)

He called her in, the way the sea called to Ahab, only without the single-minded bloodthirsty vengeance. It was so simple, after all of it―their lifetime in a month and a half―to be the first (or second) to say this isn't a fling.

She'll be paying her own way now, splitting rent with her boyfriend instead of feeling like a jittery squatter in the upscale apartment her mom selected, furnished, and paid for. Turns out the commute from his place to the publishing house isn't bad at all.

MJ did hang onto a few things, like this couch, which is becoming heavier by the second. Every break they've taken while lugging the thing upstairs has been at her request. Peter doesn't even look tired! Meanwhile, she's too wiped to even fully appreciate the tension in those arms of his, which is a fucking crime.

"You wanna set it down?" he asks with imploring eyes that always make her want to get close to him.

"Where are we putting it?" She's sweating and her hands are slipping and she's thrilled. "How about right next to your couch, in a line?"

Peter can be indecisive, so MJ's answering her own question before they find out how much damage she would cause by dropping her end. The living room is bizarrely long, but it's a weirdly-shaped apartment. The couch configuration works when she pictures it in her head.

"That could be fun actually," he agrees. They begin shuffling in that direction.

"Right?" she prompts, ducking her head to her shoulder to swipe hair out of her eyes. "Imagine walking from the kitchen to the bathroom completely on couches. We won't even have to touch the ground."


End file.
